“Asru, are all the stories of the wickedness of your past life—­your cruelty, your treachery, your blasphemy—­true?”

“Manasseh, let my past life go into the tomb of oblivion if you will.  ’Tis a sorry page for Asru to look upon.  The cruelty, the blasphemy,—­aye, boy, I was full of it; but treacherous, never!  Whatever Asru was, and no devil was blacker than he in many ways, he was never guilty of perfidy, except you call the trying to free Amzi and poor Dumah perfidy.”

“I am glad,” returned Manasseh, quietly; “yet it would not matter now, since our Asru is a changed man.”

Asru looked at the youth earnestly.  “Manasseh,” he said, “does the old nature never come back upon you?  Or have you never known what it was to feel wrong impulses?”

“Wrong impulses!” exclaimed the other.  “Yes, Asru, many and many a time.  Yet, when one does not even look at the evil, but keeps his face turned steadfastly towards the right, the old self seems to lose its hold.  In drawing near to God we draw away from evil.”

“Your words, I know, are true,” returned the other; “yet the keeping from doing wrong seems to me the hardest thing in living a Christian life.”

“But, Asru,” said Manasseh, “perhaps you are not loving enough.  The more you love Jesus, and the more you feel him in your life, the easier it will be to turn from temptation—­to hate the thing that inspires it.  If you really love him you simply cannot do what will pain him.”

“But the temptation to act hastily, to speak unkindly, comes upon me so often, Manasseh, that I grow discouraged.”

“The only safety is in always looking Above for help.  Believe me, Asru, I speak from experience.  Temptation in itself is not sin; the yielding to it is.  Little by little the temptations bother us less, and we grow in grace.  You know this is expected of us.  Paul speaks of ’perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord.’  He says, too, ’The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.’  He said, also, to the Philippians, ’It is God that worketh in you, both to will and to do of his good pleasure,’ and the Lord himself has said, ’My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.’  So, Asru, my friend, the whole secret is in accepting that gift, in knowing him, and in keeping the soul in a constant state of openness for the working of the Holy Spirit—­a ‘pray-without-ceasing’ attitude in which one’s whole life is resolved into the prayer:  ‘Thy will, not mine, be done.’”

Asru regarded Manasseh curiously.

“How is it, young as you are,” he said, “that these things are so plain to you?”

“Ah, you forget,” said Manasseh, “what a blessed home training I have had, and that from my childhood I have had Yusuf for my counsellor.  For these Christian friends of my childhood, I never cease to be thankful.”

Asru turned his face away.  “And I, too, have children, Manasseh,” he said in a low voice, “children who, with their mother, are little better than idolaters, and I have never told them differently.”